Microsoft Releases Visual Studio Code Documentary

Microsoft has published a documentary about the creation of Visual Studio Code, its free, cross-platform, open source code editor.

“Discover the story behind VS Code, from its early beginnings to the platform millions of developers use today, and the community that helped shape it along the way,” Microsoft writes in the release notes for the latest version of Visual Studio Code.

“The Story of VS Code was directed and produced by Stefan Kingham, with the help of a global team of videographers,” the company adds in the description to the documentary on YouTube. “Filming took place from November 2024 to mid-2026. Stefan would like to thank Microsoft, GitHub, Meta, Red Hat, GitKraken, Ona and AG Grid for helping bring this story to life.”

‌The Story of VS Code, the Official Documentary is about an hour and 40 minutes long and it tells the story about how Microsoft, long known as a developer tools company that focused exclusively on its own platforms, realized it needed to reach all developers, wherever they were. And so it hired Erich Gamma in 2011 to create a full integrated development environment (IDE) that could run in a web browser.

There, he created “Monaco,” a web-based code editor that formed the basis for what became VS Code. Microsoft announced the product at Build 2015 and then released its first non-preview version in early 2016. Within two years, it was the most popular software development tool on earth, and a rare example of a Microsoft product embraced by the open source community

You can watch The Story of VS Code, the Official Documentary for free on YouTube.